In verified blue checks we trust.
Twitter has never forgotten the power that its influencers possess, though they often haven’t utilized their sway as successfully as they could. Twitter is now looking to give its A-list celebrities better tools to show their fans love while conveying their own #personalbrands on the site. This has value across the site but especially adds a distinct level of intrigue to the Moments tab.
Earlier this week I chatted with Jinen Kamdar, the Global Director of Product for Twitter Media, about some of the company’s latest app offerings aimed at influencers. I also pushed Kamdar to dissect the influence that he saw celebrities wielding on the site and on Moments specifically.
Though these apps are currently only available to a few hundred celebrities and their teams, Kamdar says that Twitter plans to continue expanding the availability of the apps.
The Improved AMA
Twitter gives powerful people a more seamless means of connecting with those that are following them, but with the visual nature of nested replies you have to pretty aggressively stalk a user’s timeline in order to see their fan interactions. With its new Twitter Q&A app Twitter is making it easier for the Kardashians and Biebers of the world to interact with fans, while also giving the average user a way more attractive means of seeing celebrity/user interactions.
Check out this cool example born out of the Star Wars: Force Awakens campaign to see how engaging the new content in Moments can be.
On the celeb side, the app allows personalities and their teams to comb through massive quantities of tweets with ease, adding the ability to flag specific questions for the stars to specifically address. A very cool feature of the app is a sort of scoresheet that it presents to celebrities following Q&A sessions that shows them the followers they’ve gained and the reach their tweets have seen.
What users see is a stream of twitter-branded video and text responses that seamlessly flow into each other in a multimedia experience that is bitesized, easily digestible and a great deal of fun.
The Twitter Selfie
An immeasurable amount of news-making photo and video content is being pushed out via celebrity profiles on Twitter only to be screenshotted, uploaded and then turned into their own “news” stories on disparate sites.
To give celebrities a premium experience while also ensuring that multimedia experiences shot for Twitter adopt their own visual style, Twitter has created the Twitter Camera app.
Happy #NMM!!! Last one before Christmas, so excited!!! Send me your @Devonnebydemi makeup free Christmas glow!! pic.twitter.com/oPZx8ehjbS
— Demi Lovato (@ddlovato) December 21, 2015
The app (which borrows more than a few tricks from Snapchat) allows celebs using it to visually tag photos with hashtags and the twitter icon. It also supports quite a few emoji style icons that you can overlay onto the photos. More customization in this case equals more engaging content that allows celebs to express themselves.
This content makes for great Moments material, especially when celebrities turn into reporters at award shows like the Golden Globes or Teen Choice Awards and give fans an inside look.
To strengthen the content at shows like these Twitter has also created a third unique offering called Twitter Challenger which presents celebrities with a prompt to act upon and express themselves with, whether that’s doing a dance or answering a question.
Having fun with @Twitter's new challenger App here at their NY HQ and taking questions for the #RandRally pic.twitter.com/IMpk7v8bKh
— Rand Paul (@RandPaul) January 15, 2016
Kamdar told me the app serves largely as an update to Twitter’s Mirror app which was a single-purpose selfie app used at award shows and the ilk to get a ton of great content uploaded. Challenger adds the ability to integrate some Q&A into the mix and get celebs talking rather than just posing.
Moments to Reflect
The rise of the social media celebrity largely owes its visibility to Twitter. Motivated kids with flippy hair and charming personalities or dynamic voices have utilized the platform to build tweenage audiences and make real cash off of product endorsements of brands of face wash or specialty barbecue sauces.
The dynamic that allows these rebirths is the same engine that has further strengthened the ability of the world’s athletes, artists, government officials and “real” celebrities to express their candid voices or heavily manicured public images to the broader Internet. With these tools Kamdar hopes celebrities have an easier way to produce cool content that ends up on Moments.
“We encourage partners to basically post really great native, rich, unique content. They know that if they do that they will likely get featured in Moments, what we’re doing is a tool to make that easier,” Kamdar told me.
Moments is a feature ripe to see the curation of more verified first-hand accounts of events. By giving influencers more flexibility to interact with fans and the unverified masses, they give Moments a level of interactivity that it has often lacked.
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